Tatian, Greek Tatianos (born 120 ce, Syria—died April 173) Syrian compiler of the Diatessaron (Greek: “Through Four,” “From Four,” or “Out of Four”), a version of the four Gospels arranged in a single continuous narrative that, in its Syriac form, served the biblical-theological vocabulary of the Syrian church for centuries. Its Greek and Latin versions influenced the Gospel text. Tatian also founded, or at least was closely associated with, the heretical sect of the Encratites, a communityintegrating a severe asceticism with elements of Stoicphilosophy.

Tatian became a pupil of the 2nd-century Roman theologian Justin Martyr and converted to Christianity. He rejected the classical literary and moral values of the Greeks as corrupt and repudiated their intellectualism, preferring instead the “barbaric” Christian culture. He embraced a vague synthesis of Judeo-Christian monotheism with the Stoic concept of an intermediary logos (Greek: “word”), creating the rational and purposeful cohesion of the universe; the personal dimension was provided by belief in the fallen soul’s ultimate return to the cosmic pneuma (Greek: “spirit”) whence it came.

After Justin’s martyrdom Tatian broke with the Roman church, returned to Syria about 172, and became associated with a school and religious community of the Encratites in order to incorporate his amalgam of religious philosophy. During this period Tatian produced the two works that still survive, the Diatessaron and a discourse to the Greeks. The latter, a virulent polemic against Hellenistic (Greek) learning, presented a Christian cosmology and demonology in which Tatian negatively compared Greek polytheistictheology with the Christian concept of a unique deity whose sublimity transcended the foibles of Greek idols. Tatian submitted that the Judeo-Christian tradition furnished Greek moral philosophy with everything it contained of value; the former, however, exhibited a selflessness that was markedly absent from the latter. Tatian’s other writings, listed by the 4th-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea, have been lost.

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...Apostles,” in the services, in which they were the basis for sermons. In his writings he quoted freely from the Gospels, Hebrews, the Pauline Letters, I Peter, and Acts. Justin’s Syrian pupil, Tatian (c. 160), although he quotes from John separately, is best known for his Diatessaron (literally, “through four” [gospels], but also a musicological term meaning...

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...Greek philosophy must have received much of its wisdom from Moses. Tertullian (c. 155/160–after 220)—who once asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—and Tatian (c. 120–173), on the other hand, rejected pagan learning and philosophy as inimical to the Gospel; and the question has been intermittently discussed by theologians ever since...

...The Synoptic Gospels seem to have been used by the Apologist Justin Martyr at Rome about ad 150 in the form of an early harmony (or synthesis of the Gospels); to this, Justin’s Syrian pupil Tatian added The Gospel According to John to make his Diatessaron (according to the four), a harmony of all four Gospels so successful that in Mesopotamia...